https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/s ... ris-morris
'This isn't a paranoid future nightmare': the explosive return of Chris Morris
The satirist’s new film was inspired by the FBI’s attempts to manufacture terrorists. He talks about the problem with white liberals – and his duty to provoke
‘It’s about governments betraying citizens in the name of some bogus war’ … Morris.
Chris Morris first saw the reports on Sky News. The FBI had arrested an army planning “full ground war” on the United States. A massive jihadi battalion, trained in Miami but backed by al-Qaida, was promising to “kill all the devils we can” – starting with Chicago’s most famous skyscraper, Sears Tower.
That was in 2006. Two years later, Morris got a tipoff from someone involved in the trial that the case could be “a bit whiffy”. In fact, it was a colossal stitch-up. The bureau’s biggest counterterrorism scalp of recent times was, says Morris, “all a huge lie, before it was called fake news. Totally manufactured nonsense.”
Six broke builders in Liberty City – the impoverished suburb of Miami where Moonlight was shot – had fallen under the sway of a local preacher. Narseal Batiste’s cut-and-paste philosophy involved Haitian Catholicism, Judaism, karate – and a dash of Islam. He mouthed off but lacked the funds, foresight or any particular desire to take things further.
So the FBI paid informants, including a convicted rapist, to pose as emissaries from al-Qaida and egg Batiste on to accept $50,000 with the promise he would spend it on guns and explosives. He never did. “Instead they wanted work boots and overalls, because they were construction workers, then ceremonial swords and horses to lead a protest to the governor’s house about living conditions in Liberty City.”
Morris chucks up his hands, still agog, 13 years later. “Their idea was to push Sears Tower into a lake and swamp Chicago with a tidal wave. None of which is remotely possible. They might as well have wanted to invade Washington DC on hippos.”
‘Committed to wallop’ … Morris on the set of The Day Shall Come.
Only one of the seven had any familiarity with the tower. They had no weapons or contact with anyone not being bankrolled – and scripted – by the FBI. The deputy director himselfadmitted any plans were “more aspirational than operational”. Eventually, five of them were sentenced to a total of 44 years in prison.
Next month sees the release of The Day Shall Come, the movie Morris made after being inspired by the case, along with the 400 or so similar ones he has come across since 9/11. He estimates one arrest is made every three weeks of a suspect the FBI has coached into declaring terrorist intent. “It’s harder to capture real terrorists than it is to manufacture your own. And as someone at the Department of Justice said to me: ‘We’re not going to stop a system unless it doesn’t work.’”
The film’s hero is Moses (Marchant Davis), who runs a community farm and preaches peaceful revolution – aided by dinosaurs, summonable by trumpet – to a congregation of four, including his wife and young daughter. But a local informant (Kayvan Novak) shops him to a needy FBI agent (Anna Kendrick), eager to impress her boss (Denis O’Hare), himself in need of a high-profile victory. With the aid of a fake sheikh, a literal gift horse for Moses (with whom he talks), and some empty uranium canisters, a case is constructed. Lives are at stake. More pressingly, so are promotions.
Save for directing a few episodes of Veep, this is Morris’s first project since 2010’s Four Lions. He says that he is not concerned the films might be seen as too similar, that only the dopey would confuse the two. “They relate only in terms of the Wikipedia heading you might lazily use. Four Lions is about a group of terrorists and the flawed male psychology of the typical bunch of guys that constitutes that kind of cell. This is about a group of people the government decides are terrorists. About governments betraying citizens in the name of some bogus war on terror, flawed in its conception and execution.”
This is also Morris’s first full interview for almost a decade. Today, the most mysterious man in British comedy is wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a checked shirt that, later, he will suddenly unbutton and remove. He has ridden to his agent’s office in Fitzrovia from Brixton, where he lives with his literary agent wife and two sons, on his own trusty steed: a white racer with brass bell and vast panniers. The bike is his own friend and confidant, “partly because it doesn’t talk back”.
Morris has the alpha confidence of having been the cleverest man in the room for most of his 57 years, and probably the tallest, even without the ringlets on top. A lean wolf dressed as an off-duty headmaster, he also has the longest fingers I’ve ever seen, which rap the table for emphasis or amazement or exasperation. It gets quite a hammering.
Make no mistake: The Day Shall Come is different from Four Lions. Like much of his TV work, that film was an audacious mockery of known bogeymen, albeit slightly more deadly than the claptrap current affairs shows of The Day Today and Brass Eye, or the hipsters of Nathan Barley.
Morris in Brass Eye.
The Day Shall Come, however, is a further departure: an imagined riff on an institutional injustice that – by Morris’s own admission – has taken him 10 years to gen up on. I loved it. It has a wallop rare in cinema today; when you have done the immersive research, he says, “you’re committed to wallop”.
The films he prizes highest – Come and See, The Battle of Algiers, Son of Saul – involve “quite insane levels of commitment. False button-pushing has to be resisted as an article of faith. Resist full sentimentality! Set fire to the screen!”
But does The Day Shall Come assume too much knowledge on the part of the audience? Reaction so far seems split between those with recognition of the situation and those without. A black audience in Philadelphia, Morris reports, responded with nods. “‘Yeah, the law is a mincing machine, they’ll take advantage of any frailty you’ve got.’” They indulged Moses and “laughed across an icy divide” at the FBI. “You think: ‘Oh, this actually is the firing range. We’re sitting in it.’”
Morris’s core audience, though, has exhibited a little resistance. Perhaps such people only like to be challenged so far? “Oh God, white liberals are terrible! They’re awful! There’s a sort of feeling that they’ve done the due diligence on their own conscience and if somebody comes in and says something else bad about them, that person must be wrong.
“Of course, I’m talking about my friends here. It’s a sort of privileged position whereby your conscience is allowed to operate in a particular way, without fracturing your worldview. Then they go and have a bracing latte.”
Morris has the flippant strictness of someone who has done his homework and is unsurprised you haven’t. He didn’t feel awkward being a white man telling a black man’s story, he says, “because I felt the story had rather rudely impinged itself on me. It was a colour blind inquiry; I was trying to hunt down a lie. And I ended up looking at a system where mainly white people are manipulating mainly black and brown people. That’s the way the gradient is shaped. And people were extremely welcoming, despite my sort of alien appearance.”
He says that he never considered making a documentary, much as he delights and despairs in the zany details of the real-life cases: the FBI informant sent to infiltrate a Californian mosque who so overdid it, the mosque reported him to the FBI; the fake imam the bureau devised to try and radicalise a Chicago carjacker whose own imam denounced violence. “They made up their own ideological godfather!”
‘Betraying citizens’ … a scene from The Day Shall Come.
